GSM Testing

The GAIT phone was the only phone Sony-Ericsson would make due to having contracted with Flextronics in Malaysia for just a single run. With no further ANSI IS-136 TDMA phones to test, we sadly disposed of our TDMA test equipment and my group moved to GSM software verification.

The existing GSM verification group was small and with several departures numbered just two engineers. There were over a dozen members of the TDMA verification team that transfered over to GSM verification.

At the time, the company was in grave danger. There had been repeated waves of layoffs and the entire CDMA department was terminated. Part of the agreement between Sony and Ericsson was that Ericsson licensed chipsets to Sony-Ericsson. The vast majority of RF and protocol level development and testing shifted to Ericsson. At Sony Ericsson, we would do feature level testing of new features developed in Raleigh for North American carriers as well as regression testing.

I was assigned responsibility for over 20 GSM features including network selection/reselection, handoffs, calling number identification presentation/restriction, connected number identification presentation, EONS, emergency calls, forward, CCBS, closed user group, OMA DRM, a portion of SIM toolkit and a portion of AMR.

We had several phones for different marketing tiers coming through the lab per week. The pace reflected the sense of urgency over the overall condition of the company. Testing was done using suites of existing manually executed scripts and there was not time to develop new scripts to fill in coverage holes which in most cases were gaping.

During the 12 months I was in the GSM group, I filed multiple invention disclosures, one which became US Patent: 7,551,225.

In December 2003 after 5 years of contracting to Ericsson and Sony-Ericsson, my contract was not renewed.